Published on July 15, 2019.
This article republishes an essay originally sent out to the world on August 14, 2017, criticizing Süddeutsche Zeitung’s anti-Japanese reporting, its use of The Asahi Shimbun’s articles to demean Japan, and the anti-Japanese sentiment that resulted in Germany. The author argues that Germany should recognize its good fortune in having been surrounded not by premodern neighbors like China or South Korea, but by modern nations with high levels of culture.

July 15, 2019.
That is to say, Germany must savor the good fortune that all of its neighboring countries were modern nations with high levels of culture.
The following is an essay of mine that I sent out to the world on August 14, 2017, and it is surely an essay that Japan and the entire world should read again.
Every time I inform the world in this way of what it has known nothing about until now…that the Korean Peninsula and China are countries of bottomless evil and plausible lies…I think the following.
There was an astonishing fact that I learned for the first time after August 2014, that is, something I had never known at all while I was subscribing to and carefully reading The Asahi Shimbun.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading newspapers, whether it was using The Asahi Shimbun or was a fellow traveler with the same kind of ideology, had continued writing articles that demeaned Japan and humiliated Japan by using the anti-Japanese articles that The Asahi Shimbun had continued to write.
Its intention was to make Japan into a country that had committed atrocities like those of the Nazis and to turn the eyes of international society away from Germany and toward Japan; this is truly the lowest baseness as human beings…one should call it Nazism still alive at the bottom of their hearts, no different whatsoever from the behavior of China and South Korea.
As a result, the German people…as I have mentioned many times, I have never once been to Germany, so I know nothing at all about the daily lives of Germans.
The majority of Japanese people are the same.
Therefore, Japanese people have no resentment toward Germans at all, nor could they have any.
As for Germans, their situation is probably almost the same as mine.
The majority of German citizens must never have come to Japan.
Yet because of Süddeutsche Zeitung’s persistent reporting that despises Japan, according to an opinion survey from several years ago, about half of German citizens have anti-Japanese views.
I always think the following about the people of Süddeutsche Zeitung…low-intelligence people, but people at the basest level as human beings.
They should deeply savor the good fortune that Germany’s neighboring countries were not countries with realities like China or South Korea, countries that are essentially premodern states.
That is to say, Germany must savor the good fortune that all of its neighboring countries were modern nations with high levels of culture.